Quatuor Danel

For two decades since its foundation in 1991, the Quatuor Danel has been a major force on the international chamber music scene, its performances retaining and building on the excitement and conviction that gained it top honours at international competitions in Evian, London and St. Petersburg (Shostakovich Competition).

The Quartet has remained faithful to its founding principles, constantly renewing its work on repertoire from Haydn to the present day, in a long-term project inspired by early consultations with, amongst others, the Amadeus and Borodin Quartets, Fyodor Druzhinin (Beethoven Quartet), Walter Levin (Lasalle Quartet), Hugh Maguire (Allegri Quartet), and Pierre Penassou (Quatuor Parrenin).

More than 80 concerts per annum have taken the quartet to the great concert-halls of the world, such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, London’s Wigmore Hall, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Kitara Concert Hall in Sapporo, the Suntory Hall in Tokyo,the Konzerthaus in Vienna and the Opéra Bastille in Paris, as well as to major festivals such as AlpenKLASSIK (Germany), Ars Musica (Belgium), Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (Finland), Festival en Pays de Fayence; Festival Radio France Montpellier and Musica - Strasbourg (France), West Cork Chamber
Music Festival (Ireland), Festival George Enescu (Romania), including collaborations with musicians of the order of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Pascal Moraguès, Vladimir Mendelssohn, the Borodin, Brodsky and Enesco Quartets, and the RAI and SWR Orchestras (Turin, Stuttgart).

Tours to Japan, Russia and South America complement regular appearances in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Italy.

The Quatuor Danel is renowned for its bold, concentrated surveys of the quartet cycles of Bartok, Beethoven, Lachenmann, Schubert, Shostakovich and Weinberg. The quartet is proud of its many collaborations with major contemporary composers such as Pascal Dusapin, Sofya Gubaydulina, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Bruno Mantovani and Wolfgang Rihm, as well as with the rising stars of the 21st century.

Russian repertoire has always been one of its special strengths. Its most famous recordings include the complete Shostakovich quartets on Fuga libera and the complete Weinberg quartets for CPO, which have drawn unanimous praise from the international press. Numerous other recordings - for those companies and for Accord-Universal, Auvidis, Calliope, Col Legno, Megadisc, Ondine and Triton, - have won critical recognition (Grand prix du disque, Choc du monde de la musique, Disc of the Month for BBC Music Magazine and Fonoforum, Midem prize).

In 2005 the Quatuor Danel was appointed Artists-in-Residence at the University of Manchester in succession to the Lindsay Quartet, where the players work in partnership with musicologists such as Barry Cooper, David Fallows and David Fanning. Teaching and master-classes are a fundamental part of their activities, across Europe and in Japan.

The Quatuor Danel enjoys the support of the Communauté Française de Belgique and of Culturesfrance.

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